Skip to main content

Home page

Welcome to the SEAL community!

Social and emotional learning helps children and young people to:

‘… learn how to communicate their feelings, set themselves goals and work towards them, interact successfully with others, resolve conflicts peaceably, control their anger and negotiate their way through the many complex relationships in their lives today and tomorrow’.

This kind of learning underpins positive behaviour and attitudes to learning, personal development and mental health and wellbeing. It is at the heart of PSHE, relationships and health education.

Research shows it also helps raise attainment. Social and emotional learning is attracting increasing attention in schools. On this website you will find age-related teaching resources and whole school frameworks to support your work.

Many of them come from the national ‘Social and emotional Learning’ (SEAL) initiative. By registering with us (which is free, quick and easy), you can immediately find and download all of the national SEAL curriculum materials and teacher guidance. There’s a progression in learning objectives that can be used in any school, and training materials if you want to introduce or refresh a whole-school SEAL approach. Click on National Resources  then click the Getting Started with SEAL tab.

If you would like regularly updated teaching resources, you can also join our SEAL Community. Set up and supported by leading experts in the field, the SEAL Community is a not-for-profit organisation which aims to promote and develop SEAL through sharing news, practice, resources and expertise. Joining costs £30 for individuals, £75 for schools/settings and £100 for local authorities or other multi-school organisations. Click here to join

News update

Help build the #EmpathyGeneration Empathy Week, the global initiative for schools, will be back for a fifth year from 26th February - 1st March 202

Back in 2015 the primary SEAL resources were chosen by the Chinese Ministry of Education as the basis for a pilot social and emotional learning curriculum in five provinces in China. Julie Casey and other members of the SEAL Community visited China regularly to provide support. We’ve just heard that the programme is now very much alive and running in eight provinces , and that there are plans to develop a national secondary SEL curriculum to follow on ...
Five years after the launch of the government’s Mental Health Support Team (MHST) initiative, 28% of schools and colleges (about 6,800) are covered by a MHST ...

Calls to Childline from children under 11 struggling with loneliness have risen by 71 per cent in just five years, latest data shows.

Children and young people who feel safe in school, enjoy coming to school, and that they belong in school were less likely to have a mental disorde

Sharing practice

Y1 children at Pembroke Dock Community School read the fantastic text ‘The Invisible’ , by Tom Percival, which is great for work on empathy

Last year a group of London schools worked together on a project to tackle social, emotional and mental health needs.

One school in the US has turned a room into a brilliant social and emotional learning centre.

Eight schools in the Pentrehafod cluster in Swansea (seven primary, one secondary) did some great work with the organisation EmpathyLab.

RULER is a well-researched American SEL programme which uses four main tools: a class or school Charter, a Mood Meter, tools to m

Resource roundup

Y6 lesson plan, PowerPoint and video from the Public Health England School Zone . Includes a nice ‘worry tree’ activity , where pupils learn to work through a series of questions that will help them deal with worries, and a take home sheet for families. mmary
DefaulNeed to calm an over-excited primary class? Try this short Go Noodle activity that involves ‘square breathing’t summary
Here you will find a booklet from the organisation Papyrus, for young people who are depressed or contemplating suicide. It helps them make a Hope Box filled with things to make them feel better when in crisis. efault summary

Brilliant new resources to develop empathy skills and support anti-hate discussions, and to help children learn how to be good listeners

New ideas and resources here for the SEAL themes about setting goals, persistence, resilience, confidence

Practical tools

In the last newsletter we shared Empathy Lab’s emotion maps , which children can use to identify how they are feeling. One of them - Islands of Emotion – inspired The SEAL Community’s Julie and her family to come up with some very creative ideas for places on their own Islands , to describe their ‘worst days’...
You are probably teaching your students about the neuroscience of emotions (the fight or flight response, the upstairs and downstairs brain and so on).We can also teach them the reason why we often seem to look on the downside of life ...
Yes you can! Tell the class a story based on the picture book Ordinary Mary and the Extraordinary Deed by Emily Pearson...

Help children understand that ‘we have more in common than that which divides us’  by playing Just Like Me:

We came across a new metaphor for explaining to children how the brain works and really liked it. It goes like this.

New research

This study investigated the effects of a 3E (early prevention, early identification, early intervention) social and emotional lea

Back in 2015 the primary SEAL resources were chosen by the Chinese Ministry of Education as the basis for a pilot social and emotional learning curriculum in five provinces in China. Julie Casey and other members of the SEAL Community visited China regularly to provide support. The programme is now very much alive and running in eight provinces, and its impact has been researched in this study of a SEAL-based programme.

 In 2023, several major reports added to the long-standing evidence base for social and emotional learning.

According to the Word Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2023 report, qualities associated with emotional intelligence such as resilience, curiosity, lifelong learning, motivation, and self-awareness, are highly prized by businesses and will continue to be so for the next few years. Empathy and active listening figure highly too. Read more ...

 You may have heard of the ‘marshmallow experiment’ which tested young children’s ability to delay gratification.

Top resource

In I Really Want to Shout by Simon Philip, a little girl uses witty and insightful rhyme to tell us about the things that make her angry...

In this book by Kate Milner, a young boy discusses the journey he is about to make with his mother...

This is the Education Endowment Foundation's guidance report...

Imagine a world where everyone is kind...
Expandaball This expanding ball is great for teaching mindful breathing...